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Summary:
“Shooting an Elephant” is a narrative essay by George Orwell about a conflicted period of Orwell’s life
while he works as a police officer for the British Empire in colonial Burma (now Myanmar, is a
Southeast Asian nation of more than 100 ethnic groups, bordering India, Bangladesh, China, Laos and
Thailand)
...
The
Burmese people also naturally despise and ridicule Orwell, for, as policeman, he is the face of the
Empire
...
Orwell
discusses this complex inner conflict and illustrates it through a story of killing an elephant
...
He has no desire to shoot the elephant, but believing
he needs to appear in control in front of the Burmese people, he brings his rifle to the scene
...
He feels compelled to uphold this front, and as he
contemplates the best way to kill the elephant without making a fool of himself, he analyzes his fear
of being humiliated and how that is the essential fear of the Empire itself and of the white man in
British Raj (the British Empire in India)

Killing the elephant turns out not to be easy at all
...
Orwell describes the
scene in clear, unaffected prose, and he ultimately reveals his inability to do the decent thing and put
elephant out of its misery
...
They’re also happy to
come get the meat from the dying animal
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But he walks away from
the suffering elephant, leaving it to bleed to death and feeling shame
...
It symbolizes the brutal attempt of the British
colonizers to control a people; it also tells the story of a personal dilemma manifesting and playing
out in a dramatic, violent scene
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It is revealed to be a mixture of social pressure and a
quirk of personal psychology
...
He has power of life and death over the imperial subjects in Burma, but he feels trapped
by his position as a ruler
...

It is clear that Orwell is ashamed of his actions
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He diminishes his own competence several
times
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The elephant is something natural that was there before Orwell got there; because of him, it
is gone forever
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All he wanted was to
"avoid looking a fool
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Allegory:
The actual shooting of the elephant works as an allegory for the British colonial project in
Burma
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This feeling represents
the guilt of attempting to commandeer an entire culture and society
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Orwell puts multiple bullets into the elephant, but in the end,
he has to leave to bleed to death
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Symbol: The Policeman
As a police officer, Orwell's presence holds symbolic power within Burmese society
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When he goes to
shoot the elephant, he does so as a police officer representing British colonial authority
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If he fails, the British imperial project will
be shown to fail
...


Symbol: The Elephant
The rampaging elephant is easy to read as a symbol of Burmese society: unwieldy,
untethered and ultimately impossible to subdue
...
In the
way that the elephant runs amok, and is impossible to contain without violence, the Burmese
defiance of British rule is a constant, making itself known by jeers and humiliation
...
When we see him
shooting the elephant, we are seeing the same demonstration of force the British imperialists
use over the Burmese people
...
He
opens by revealing the brutality of British colonialism in Burma, with images of tortured
prisoners, and he discusses his distaste for the empire's impact in Burma
...
Orwell's self-consciousness as the face of British imperialism is central to his internal
conflict as he tries to uphold the image of the impenetrable empire while going against his
personal inclination, and killing an elephant that he doesn't want to kill
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In this way he is compelled to kill the (now
peaceful) elephant
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The imperial police officer is willing to sacrifice his sense of what is right, and to fulfill
the role of oppressor and tyrant, in order to save face
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Theme: Colonial Resentment
One of the central themes threaded through the essay is the latent resentment of the
colonized people of Burma for the British occupiers who aim to control their society, yet
cannot fully do so
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Theme: The Performance of Power
Orwell describes power as being fundamentally performative; it's also illustrated as such
through the heavily allegorical aspect of his act of shooting the elephant
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With the crowd watching, he must appear to be in control
of the situation
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Theme: Taming the Colonized Subject
Related to the theme of the performance of power is a clear theme of "taming" that plays
out in the scenario of a man controlling a wild beast
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If he falters in his performance, he'll make room for the colonized Burmese
to see through imperial control and to subsequently cease to respond to that control
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As the face of the British empire, Orwell is personally subject to the Burmese peoples'
derisions of the empire
...
By seeing Orwell's personal criticisms of
that Empire contrasted with his experience as a representative of it, we are able to reflect on
the experience of policing, and of representing state power more generally
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Theme: Natural Life
When we see the elephant grazing in the paddy field, we see the naturalness of its existence
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The presence of the "white man" or the British empire contrasts with this
naturalness and literally physically disrupts it
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The irony of Orwell's allegiance
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Orwell states openly that he is on the side of the oppressed Burmese people and
secretly despises the British Empire
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Orwell states: “With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an
unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum* , upon the
will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the
world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts" (31)
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His description of the British Raj is as the ultimate
oppressor, keeping its prostrate subjects pinned down eternally
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*In saecula saeculorum Latin: forever and ever



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